Did somebody say a week is a long time in journalism? "Thank you & goodbye," said the final front page of the News of the World, and with its demise, 200 staff face an uncertain future, greeted already by offers of just 90 days' payment before redundancy. It has been said many times, but is worth saying again, that the vast majority of those 200 have not been and will not be implicated in the phone-hacking scandal, to emphasise the point that nobody in the inky business sees closure as desirable.

Yet there is far more to this moment than the loss of a Sunday newspaper. Last week saw genuine revulsion at Murdoch journalism and the Murdoch machine, sentiment usually confined to Guardian readers and citizens of Liverpool. You saw that in the moment when Sean Cassidy, a father of a 7/7 bombing victim, Ciaran, was asked by News International's spokesman for his phone number on air on Radio 5 Live, and shot back with "You already have it".

Ostensibly, the reason we are here is phone hacking; the truth is that for too long the Murdoch organisation and its key lieutenants, headed by Rebekah Brooks, have acted like a state within a state. It's an operation focused on Oxfordshire dinner parties and closed-door relationships with Britain's political elite. At the top of News Corp all that ultimately matters is one's personal relationship with Rupert Murdoch and family, with accountability to outside forces secondary. Brooks gives no interviews; she has no need to if she can schmooze prime ministers discreetly – David Cameron's constituency home is close to her husband's farm.

The result is that News Corp pleases itself, acknowledging very little external constraint. Clearly NoW journalists thought they could get away with ordering phone hacking: they had the money, nobody to stop them, and a newspaper that was happy to print the results. After all, when criticised, the parent company's first reaction was to issue threats; not least when this newspaper was told by Brooks it had "misled the British public" after it had the temerity to suggest hacking might have gone on on a wider scale.

Now, it may be possible to argue that the era of "industrial" phone hacking is behind the NoW. Yet it is not possible to argue that the era in which executives insisted the problem was not widespread is past. Most of those bosses, from Brooks down, are still with the organisation, which has failed to explain credibly why it took five years to acknowledge the seriousness of what happened. And why has nobody taken responsibility for that?

There has been a lot of chat too about whether News Corp is a fit and proper owner of BSkyB. Set aside hacking, and think about Formula One – a sport James Murdoch has indicated his interest in buying too. Recall, also, that the NoW gratuitously exposed former F1 boss Max Mosley as having taken part in a sado-masochistic orgy, unnecessarily publishing a video of it to prove its point. It justified its actions thus: "Taking part in depraved and brutal S&M orgies on a regular basis does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to be expected of someone in his [Mosley's] hugely influential position." Well, if whipping is enough to fail on the fit and proper front, what should we make of the bid for BSkyB?

Too sure of its own power, too much backdoor access, too unwilling to admit its failures: these are some of the reasons why Murdoch's company should not be allowed to own BSkyB. If one media organisation thinks it is uniquely powerful already, why should it be allowed to become more so? Ed Miliband is brave to call for MPs to vote to block the BSkyB deal. On this issue, it is time people were counted.